TRAVIS MACDONALD

Across these works, long-haired androgynous figures inhabit a setting suspended between rural life and subcultural staging. Rooted in hippie movements, these protagonists also function as analogues of the artist himself. MacDonald returns to this type of figure to explore how self-portraiture can take on different roles. Hair operates on several levels here. It carries associations of style and refusal, but it is equally bound to the material demands of his method. Wet oil descends under gravity, lending contour to each body and to the atmosphere around it. The result is an elongation that echoes the romantic spirit of Art Nouveau, with its affinity for elegance and ghostly sensuality.

The title Had a Farm introduces the exhibition with wit, giving the artist’s name an almost folkloric ring. Yet MacDonald is clear that “the farm is not to be taken literally.” Instead, it becomes a frame for cultivation, whether of a practice, an ideology, or even hair itself. The paintings unfold in an imagined settlement, based on photographic archives of experimental communes from the 1970s, many established in disused farms or small towns. From that source, he builds scenes shaped by proximity and friction, and by the wish to (co)exist otherwise.

Before the brush meets the canvas, MacDonald writes a script and assembles a storyboard. The premise is simple: amid a housing crisis, young, educated people relocate to a provincial area, where they encounter conservative residents whose families have been there for generations. The clash is both cultural and political. MacDonald approaches it obliquely. He does not reduce it to a slogan. Rather, he selects intimate episodes and small but revealing gestures, rendering them as compositions whose natural, earthy palette keeps the drama grounded.

These paintings draw on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1973 essay Il discorso dei capelli, published in English as_The Hippies’ Speech._ MacDonald responds to Pasolini’s understanding of appearance as a political sign and to the responsibility of paying attention to one’s surroundings. The reference feels timely. Without making the works direct statements, he suggests a quiet parallel between past expressions of nonconformity and the current rise of authoritarian thinking. Care, in this context, is not softness. It is an ethic of alertness.

What emerges in Had a Farm is a world with its own logic. MacDonald has developed this language over time, using it as a vehicle for storytelling and observation. Here, it grows sharper and more decisive. The show invites viewers into a charged social space where identification remains open and belonging stays provisional. It is a place of attraction and unease. The pull of a group is palpable, as is the strain that shadows any departure from the norm. These paintings do not offer escape. They ask how closeness can hold under pressure, and whether something larger than the self might still be forged.

Text by Nicolas Vamvouklis